The Swedish DJ Who Invented Industrially-Manufactured Pop Music (bbc.com)

"BBC Culture reports on DJ Denniz Pop (born Dagge Volle), who couldn't sing, play an instrument, or write a song but could mathematically craft a song from stitching together electronically programmed sounds and beats," writes Slashdot reader dryriver. "Pop was the musical brains behind acts ranging from the Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, Ace Of Base to Britney Spears, and trained Max Martin who wrote 22 Billbooard #1 hits for the likes of Taylor Swift, The Weeknd, Katy Perry, P!nk, Justin Timberlake, Ariana Grande and Maroon 5 using a technique called 'Melodic Math.'" From the report: In a basement in Stockholm's suburbs, Pop brought together an elite team of eight songwriters and producers for a new venture -- Cheiron Studios -- in 1992. Over the next eight years they would go on to sell hundreds of millions of records through the likes of Ace of Base, 5ive, Robyn, Boyzone, Backstreet Boys, Westlife, *NSYNC and Britney Spears. The secret of their songwriting success was to marry the melody to the beat, not work against it, and to have a big chorus. The team at Cheiron followed Pop's example, experimenting in clubs across the capital with up to a hundred different versions of each new track -- meticulously documenting the combinations of beats and melodies that made the club crowds go wild. Through these experiments, an entirely new genre of music blossomed, one that seemed tailor-made for the age of manufactured boybands and girl groups. Having grown up in socialist Sweden, Pop's approach to writing music was almost utilitarian. Like so many Swedish success stories -- IKEA, H&M, Volvo and Spotify -- the Cheiron team wanted their product to appeal to the maximum amount of people, which in a country with a population of only nine million meant focusing outside the nation's borders. Pop designed his music to reflect the lives of the people who bought more music than anyone else -- American teenagers -- at least as far as he understood them from his basement in faraway Stockholm.

Comments

One problem

[rsilvergun]

ok, two problems. First, 75-80% of Venezuela business is private, so they're not socialist either. And Socialism isn't the Government owning the means of production, it's the people. And that takes North Korea and Cuba out of the running.

We can argue that it's not possible to have true socialism since the people will never be able to claim ownership of the means of production from a ruling elite, but we're not arguing if socialism is _possible_, we're arguing over the definition.

As for possible, sure it is, as Democratic Socialism. Simply put, I don't give a rat's fuck who owns what as long as I've got what I need and as long as everybody else does. So to keep power balanced keep private ownership and then regulate the shit out of it.

Or to put it more succinctly: Legal, Taxed and Regulated.

Re:One problem

[_Sharp'r_]

Your Venezuela statistic is flawed by the fact that as more businesses and industries in Venezuela were nationalized, they each began shrinking in size over time. So if you're just measuring as a percentage of GDP, it looks like over time as more were taken over (and then shrank in output), their % of the total gets smaller. In 2010 the "private" part was considered to be 2/3 of the economy and much more has been nationalized and put under government control since then.

Tl;DR version: Your stat is mostly reflecting the fact that government-run businesses tend to collapse and thus stop contributing as much to GDP.